I am so grateful to Bob Dannals for extending the invitation to be with you this morning. My name is Gary Hall, and I am a retired priest who can’t seem to stop working. I served in my time parish rector, seminary professor and dean, and finally Dean of Washington National Cathedral. My wife Kathy and I live in my home town of Los Angeles now, and so I deeply appreciate Judi Counts’ yearly invitation to spend December as priest in residence at the House of the Redeemer five blocks north of here on 95th St, a few doors east of Fifth Avenue. If you don’t know the House of the Redeemer, check it out. We offer services at 8 am and 5:30 pm five days a week, and also serve as a retreat house and conference center. The place is a gem, and I’m proud to be associated with it. Please come to one of our services or check us out online.
I had a kind of a shock a few days ago. Upon coming out of a room into a hallway, I saw an open door with a frail looking old man looking back at me. I paused to let him exit his door first, but he didn’t move. It took me a while to realize that I was looking not at another door but at a mirror. The frail old man I saw was, in fact, me.
While I still tend to imagine myself as a hearty thirty-five year-old, it took an encounter with a big mirror to show me how I really am. Mirrors often lie to us, but they can also tell us the truth. Artists and prophets do the same.
One day last week, Kathy and I took the train to New Canaan, Connecticut to visit the architect Philip Johnson’s famous glass house. I had seen pictures of this house for years, but it wasn’t until we were standing in it that I understood the place’s true magic. It’s a small house, built of glass, surrounded by 50 acres of landscape. Like the jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the house organizes and gives shape to the world
around it. The landscape reveals itself to you because of the way the house helps you see it.
This is, of course, how art functions. It teaches us to see. In the same way, this is how biblical prophecy functions. My late friend and lifelong mentor Harvey Guthrie was a priest and Old Testament scholar. In his seminary lectures about prophets, he was careful to disabuse us students of our preconceptions. Conservative Christians think prophets predict the future. Progressive Christians think they “speak truth to power”. In Harvey’s way of thinking, they do neither. Instead, in his words
[One is a] prophet not in the sense that he calls us to reform or exhorts us to pursue a program or predicts what is to be. Israel’s prophets did not essentially do any of these things. They verbalized what was there in their times. The prophet sees reality and verbalizes it and finds that it can be affirmed—and that that affirmation involves the fulfillment of one’s self.
As do mirrors and artworks, prophets tell us how things are. We live in a world of appearances. We look around us and think the world to be stressful and bleak. But the prophet sees beyond appearances. The bleakness is an illusion. Something bigger, deeper, and better is going on. That is what we hear in Isaiah’s words:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
. . .
to comfort all who mourn . . .
Later on, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus will use these words to announce his own ministry. He is among us, as Isaiah was, to tell us how things actually are. If we saw truly, we would wear “the oil of gladness instead of mourning”. Things are, and will be, OK.
Now at one level, all this sounds kind of crazy. You could argue that prophets are out of touch with reality—that they’re whistling in the dark, living in a fantasy world. But prophets are not dreamers. They are the clear-eyed souls in every generation who see things as they are. And what they see is the persistence of hope in a world of despair, justice in a time of bad faith, love in a climate of hate. These aren’t just greeting card pieties. They are the deepest most powerful truths of life.
And in the Gospel for today, we see the compelling figure of John the Baptist. He was clearly one impressive person. In the words of last Sunday’s gospel, “Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” John would stand out anywhere. Even in Southern California, a man walking around dressed like that and calling people to repent would attract attention. And yet today’s gospel tells us, “He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” John the Baptist may have been the last preacher in Christendom to make and understand that distinction.
The good news from John the Baptist this morning is that God is doing something big and beautiful and new. He is telling us that God is up something. The coming of Jesus will change our lives. As Julian of Norwich put it, “All shall be well.” Great. But how do we live into that hopeful wellness in a cynical, contentious age?
The key to our making the gospel hope real lies for me in our psalm this morning, Psalm 126. This is one of my two or three favorite psalms. It comes from the time of Israel’s exile in Babylonian captivity. It was written in a time of utter hopelessness.
1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, *
then were we like those who dream.
2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, *
and our tongue with shouts of joy. . . .
6 Those who sowed with tears *
will reap with songs of joy.
7 Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, *
will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.
Think, as you hear it, about the time line projected by this psalm. The singers of it are speaking in the present moment of Babylonian captivity. And yet they sing exuberantly about God’s liberation. They talk about it not in the future tense (as a wished event) but in the past tense (as a completed event). “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, “they announce, “then were we like those who dream.” They go on to describe mouths filled with laughter and tongues with shouts of joy. The hoped-for fulfillment is proclaimed as an achieved fact. The exiled Israelites will dare to live as if their liberation has already happened. Even though they are imprisoned now, they will choose to live in that captivity as free people. And living as free people will help bring about their ultimate liberation.
Whenever we say this psalm in our liturgy I find my heart and imagination stirred. What would it mean for me, for you, for all of us to live as if what we most deeply long for were already a reality? Think of all the forces of life that oppress us—from political and social forces beyond our control to our own bad habits to the physical illnesses and inevitable losses we suffer and grieve. What would it mean for our lives if we were to choose to act as if our prayers had been answered, as if God’s promises had already been fulfilled? I don’t mean that in some fairy tale way—I mean it in the way the early Christians meant it when they chose to live not in the oppressive control of Rome but in the freeing light of the resurrection. Caesar was not their king; Jesus was. They lived as citizens of his reign and enacted God’s abundant blessing even in times of privation. They were free even in captivity.
The Advent season is our opportunity to reclaim and orient our lives around the promises at the center of the Gospel. Our hope is one proclaimed in the midst of pain as the place where God’s promises become real.
These prophetic truths will find their perfect fulfillment at Christmas. But for the next eight days, let us live together in Advent hope. God is up to something good and big and deep for us, for those we love, and for our world. Our calling as Jesus’s companions is to hold on to that hope and make it ours, to live as free people even in moments of darkness and pain. That is a tall order, but we are up to it, because before us there is Jesus, one who lived that way himself. As he comes towards us now, let us keep our eyes on Jesus and learn from him how to live lives of wholeness, blessing, and peace in what is, when we see it truly, a beautiful and generous world.
So when you next step out of a door into the shocking view of yourself in a mirror, remember: Jesus sees you, loves you, knows you, and is coming toward you. All shall be well. Amen.
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